Failure Of Reconstruction

The North won the Civil War, but there were hundreds of thousands on both sides who had died. Yet, despite being a time of pain and struggle, there was so much opportunity for change. In addition to the end of slavery, the war was supposed to create economic opportunities for everyone. It seemed like many thought the Civil War was a Second American Revolution. Reconstruction, the rebuilding period after the Civil War, was a time of great uncertainty in the country caused by the tension between radical Northerners who wanted to punish the South and fix inequities; and Southerners who wanted to keep their racist prior way of living. The reason why these efforts to repair the country failed to have an effect was not limited to one part of the
country. The failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War was the result of racism in the North as well as the ex-Confederate states.
As soon as the war ended, white Southerners used all their power to reinstate racial dominance and promote white supremacy. They passed a series of laws known as “Black Codes,” that kept black Southerners living as close to slavery as the Thirteenth Amendment would allow. Apprenticeship of black children to white masters, arresting black men for vagrancy, then fining them and hiring them out to anyone who paid the fines, are just some of the many examples of these unfair conditions. The punishment could be anything from lashing to a chain gang, just as if slavery was still legal. Thus, even though blacks had their freedom under the 13th Amendment, they were still less than Second Class citizens in the eyes of whites.
President Johnson failed to have the federal government intervene to support former slaves due to his racist views of White supremacy. Even though Johnson was against the secession of the states, he was even more against equality for blacks. His leniency towards the ex-Confederate states started off Reconstruction at a disadvantage. Johnson insisted on the abolition of slavery for the ex-Confederate states’ return to the Union merely to punish the slavocracy, or rich plantation slaveholders, whom he believed looked down on him when he was a poor Southern boy in Tennessee. He was not concerned with the human toil and suffering of the black slaves. In his 1867 message to Congress, Johnson shared his racist belief that “blacks possessed less capacity for government than any other race of people. . . . On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”(Foner,”Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution”) By letting Southerners know that the leader of the Union viewed blacks as animals, he made them feel comfortable in ignoring former slaves human rights. Johnson believed that “white men alone must manage the South.” (Foner,”Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution”) When he gave amnesty to the ex-Confederates, this allowed these traitors to recover property seized after the war that had been promised to the freedmen.
Blacks wanted the independent opportunity to work and own their own land, but that was not the freedom expected by the Radical Republicans and certainly not the ex-Confederates.
Instead, they expected the freed slaves to work the cotton fields as laborers, so when the ex-Confederates regained the tracts of 40 acres so proudly, yet briefly owned by ex-slaves there was no compensation plan. The North benefited from the cotton trade and was required to fulfill the needs of the textile industry.(Dattel,”Northern Racism Helped Doom Reconstruction”) The ‘share-cropping’ implemented by Radical Reconstruction was therefore designed by Northerners to prevent blacks being held by force, but it kept them in a vicious cycle of indebtedness not far from the despair of slavery. According to scholar and historian WEB DuBois blacks “knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery, under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered.”(DuBois,”The Freedmen’s Bureau”) Blacks understood they would have a fight to push against Southern racism because Reconstruction threatened their way of
life. By allowing the dissolving of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the North’s Radical Republicans abandoned one of the strongest tools for balancing power and integrating the ex-slave into his community.
The North, when left with only slavery to defend, and no economic benefit, would abandon blacks to fend for themselves. Although there were some problems with implementation, with results like healthcare, resettlement of the displaced, education and the founding of schools, like Howard University and Fiske University “there is no doubt that the Freedmen’s Bureau relieved much suffering among blacks and whites.”(Franklin and Moss,”From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans”) In spite of all black’s positive in the South due to the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau sadly, its services ended in 1869. Economic dependency, and widespread violence from white supremacists, and Northerners retreat from the ideals of equality doomed the Freedmen’s
Bureau.
Northern Democrats, such as the Copperheads, and other white groups in the Northern states, like the New York City Irish population, fought emancipation and wanted Reconstruction to fail because they feared that ex-slaves would come North and take away jobs. The Copperheads sympathized with the South and came from mainly in the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois), where many families had Southern roots and where their agriculture interests caused resentment of the taking over of industrialists in the Republican Party and federal government. (Foner,”Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution”)
The 15th Amendment gave the black male vote to the entire nation, opening opportunity for ex-slaves to have a voice in the nation’s policies, however racism kept many emancipated blacks in the North from voting or from fair treatment as citizens. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts were the only states where black men never lost the right to vote. (Samels,”Grant, Reconstruction and the KKK”) Bitter hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents resulted in them manipulating Northerners to think that blacks suffrage was going to be a problem. They claimed that having blacks vote and giving them fair wages was forcing communism on the South. The New York Tribune whites ”trying to overthrow the black majority. . .were not racists; they were anti-communists.” (Dattel,”Northern Racism Helped Doom Reconstruction”) However, it was apparent that it was simply racism and not communism.
White terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan began a campaign of murder, assault, and arson against Reconstruction supporters, Congress struck back with three Enforcement Acts (1870-1871) designed to stop the terrorism and protect black voters when state authorities failed to protect citizens from the vigilantes. However, by that time the Klan’s actions had already weakened black and Republican morale throughout the south.(Franklin and Moss,”From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans”) The North was aware of these attacks, and could have stopped them earlier, or sent in stronger force, but by this time Reconstruction was no longer important to the North or Republicans. As the Northern Republican party became more conservative, less interest was given to the cause of Reconstruction. In the Compromise of 1877, Hayes withdrew the last of the federal troops from the South, allowing the few remaining Reconstruction governments to collapse. Once again, racism ended the hopes of black slaves to have an equal opportunity to live free.(Franklin and Moss,”From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans”)
In the end, the failure of Reconstruction was the result of decisions based on racial bias in the North as well as the South. What began as hope for a free and unified country turned into apathy by whites when the American economy went into depression. Although different sides, neither one of them truly viewed blacks as human beings in the image of God.